Posted
by
Cliff
on Thursday May 09, 2002 @04:46PM
from the when-you-can't-carry-them-with-you dept.

smart2000 asks: "I'm tired of lugging around dead trees. I've just moved offices and had to move over 100 pounds of 'essential' technical books. It is clear to me that the dead tree industry is never going to supply the books I want in electronic form, so it's time to do it myself. What hardware and software should I use?"

"The Plan: Take the binding of each book and cut it off. Feed into a scanner with duplex and cut-sheet feeder. Scan as a 300 DPI jpeg with compression. Then OCR them overnight. I don't expect the OCR to be perfect, just good enough to use as a searchable index.

What are the suitable scanner choices for Linux? Any recommendations for OCR software that will write in an open format? Has anyone done this before?"

You could always look into those funky OCR pens that you see in some electronics catalogs. Basicaly it's a pen with an optical sensor that you scan over lines of text to digitize them, they can then be transferred to a computer or to a palm pilot (or like product)

Cool idea. You could sell special 3D glasses with an encrypted pattern that you would have to purchase to read a book. With the print on demand technologies, book seller might create a system where people have to get a special printing of the book that fits only their encrypted readers. That way you can guarantee that only one person reads the book. You could also create a pretty good database of what people read. This would give you a good idea on who are the subversive elements in society.